San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
‘Sorrowful’ street predates punishments
First of all, I must say I did not agree with the name change of Durango Boulevard to Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard (in 2011) and
Old Highway 90 to Enrique M. Barrera Parkway (in 2016). These are street names that are part of San Antonio’s history. My question is about La Calle Dolorosa: Dolorosa Street, which in Spanish means “the painful street.” Growing up on the West Side, I heard legends about this street. One story was that there had been a massacre of women and children on the street by Mexican Army troops. Can you ask history folks about this?
Some sad things have happened on this old central-city street, including a devastating fire and a child run over by a delivery wagon around the turn of the last century, but none of them gave Dolorosa its name.
The story you heard probably refers to the aftermath of the Battle of Medina, which took place Aug. 13, 1813, about 20 miles south of San Antonio.
This conflict between rebels “attempting to wrest Texas away from Spain” and a Spanish royalist army was the “bloodiest battle ever fought on Texas soil,” according to the battle’s entry in the Handbook of Texas, written by Robert H. Thonhoff, author of “The Texas Connection with the American Revolution” and other books on Texas history.
The encounter between a force of about 1,400 men “composed of Anglos, Tejanos, Indians and former royalists” and an army of 1,830 soldiers sent “to quell the rebellion” turned into a four-hour battle “involving infantry, cavalry and artillery,” routing the republicans. “Most of those not killed on the battlefield were caught and executed during the retreat,” wrote Thonhoff, while the royalists lost only 55 men.
After the battle, the royalist commander, Gen. Joaquin de Arredondo — one of whose aides was Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, destined to return to San Antonio for the Battle of the Alamo — established martial law in San Antonio and “severely punished the rebels and their families.” Thonhoff doesn’t detail those punishments, but there are several versions of actions taken against women of San Antonio families thought to have been sympathetic to the rebels who had made a declaration of independence for Texas a few months earlier in the city.
A detailed account appears in the San Antonio Express, June 9, 1936, in one of a series of historical articles commemorating the Texas Centennial. A popular legend, according to the story, claims that Dolorosa received its name when Arredondo “imprisoned 40 women of San Antonio in the old Curbelo home (covered here April 4, 2010) at the corner of Dwyer Avenue and Dolorosa and compelled them to grind 14 bushels of corn daily on metates (grindstones) and make the entire lot of meal into tortillas for (the royalist) soldiers.”
Another version recounted by David P. Green in “Place Names of San Antonio” said the women were “held in confinement in a large enclosure near the pres- ent-day (Bexar County) courthouse,” where they were forced to cook and serve the conquering army “under oppressive conditions,” to the point where some of the women died. Thus, “in memory of the sufferings of those women, the street on which they were held is said to have been named Via Dolorosa.”
Both the 1936 Express story and Green stress there is documentary evidence that the street name predated the 1813 battle by more than two decades. “In the records at (the) Bexar County Courthouse is a deed of 1778 in which Governor Baron de Ripperda granted a lot to Juana Maria de Villanueve, and the lot is described as being on Amargura Street until it connects with Dolorosa.” Green notes that the name, as Via Dolorosa, appeared on city street maps as early as 1790.
The street name was known as Calle de la Dolorosa in 1782, when land grants there were made to Juan Perez and Bonifacio Hernandez, “So the name dates back well before any of the legends associated with it,” said J.F. “Frank” de la Teja, chief executive officer of the Texas State Historical Association and former Texas state historian (2007-2009).
La Dolorosa, said de la Tejas, is the Spanish name for the manifestation of the Virgin
Mary associated with Christ’s Crucifixion. “Her full name is Nuestra Señora de los Dolores (La Dolorosa for short) or in English, Our Lady of Sorrows.” The name Via Dolorosa signifies “something different … reputedly the route taken by Christ to the Crucifixion — in English, ‘the Way of the Cross.’ ” Related street names occur in other Spanish-speaking cities, most notably, Calle la Dolorosa in Madrid. The figure of La Dolorosa, said de la Teja “was and remains an important object of veneration among Catholics, particularly in the Hispanic world.”